Tessa asks her team a question. By Thursday, nothing has come back. Max fills the gap in a second. Tessa leaves it open.
What this film is
A fiction. Tessa and Max are invented. The ideas come from the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion (1897–1979). It is my reading of his work, paraphrased and simplified.
Three ideas from Bion
Thinking starts with what is missing. A thought begins when something we expect does not come. If the absence can be borne, it can become a thought.
Two ways out. We can get rid of the frustration, or we can hold it long enough to think it through.
Raw, then digested. A raw experience we cannot yet think (a “beta element”) can only be pushed out. The work that turns it into something we can think, dream and remember is the “alpha function”.
Negative capability
Bion borrowed the phrase from the poet John Keats: being “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts”, without rushing after facts and reasons.
About the workplace part
The unanswered message, the notebook and the meeting where Tessa counts to five are mine, not Bion's. They apply his ideas to everyday work.
Sources
W. R. Bion, “A Theory of Thinking”, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 1962.
W. R. Bion, Learning from Experience, Heinemann, 1962.
W. R. Bion, Attention and Interpretation, Tavistock, 1970.
John Keats, letter to his brothers George and Tom, December 1817.